Gelid is a relative newcomer to the world of aftermarket CPU coolers, an area of hardware that can be notoriously tough to break into. However, 2009 saw companies such as Titan come out of leftfield with its excellent Fenrir CPU cooler making competition from more established firms look decidedly average. There’s therefore no reason that Gelid can’t do the same with the Tranquillo, the company’s first foray into performance cooling for the latest LGA1156 and LGA1366 CPUs, as well as AMD’s modern sockets.

Upon unboxing the cooler, Gelid certainly seems to have been set on producing something unique with the Tranquillo – a rarity in this market. While the Tranquillo adopts a fairly standard tower heatsink structure, it sports a unique “wave” cooling fin design. The deep recess placed behind the centre of the cooling fan and mirrored by a jutting bulge on the opposite side is designed to avoid the deadzone behind the fan’s motor housing, allowing air to circulate behind it and then enter the cooling fin stack, ensuring there’s airflow over the entire surface area of the heatsink.

Click to enlarge

The forty aluminium cooling fins are themselves covered in tiny bumps, encouraging turbulence to again help optimise airflow through the cooler’s fin stack. The stack of ins itself is held together very well by clips alongside the sides, and it was pleasingly difficult to accidentally bend or mis-shape the fins – something that’s often all too easy to do with other CPU coolers.

Of course, the fin stack is useless unless the cooler can direct heat away from the CPU and into the metal sheets effectively, and for this task Gelid has employed four U-shaped copper heatpipes. Each heatpipe passes through the CPU contact plate, which is made of a combination of aluminium and copper.

Click to enlarge - The Tranquillo uses a deep wave design to negate the dead zone behind the fan's motor

The surface of the contact plate is well machined copper, and is moulded tightly around the heatpipes above it, with an aluminium heatsink cum mounting bracket fitted above. This does mean that only half of each heatpipe’s surface area is in contact with the more thermally efficient copper base, which could be a disadvantage in comparison to direct contact heatsinks such as the Titan Fenrir which use specially flattened heatpipes to form part of the CPU contact.